When I was in primary school, there was a locally-published series of books called “Bookworm Short Stories” that revolved around the daily adventures of a group of (somewhat stereotypical) Singapore kids in primary school. It was fairly popular at the time – I still have a few of the old books, but I never thought too much of them (Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl were far superior in my eyes). The publishers would come around to my school about once a semester and try and make us all buy the newest copies of their books, sign up for fan newsletters and so on..it was pretty depraved marketing, now that I think about it.

Anyhow, an idle comment in IRC prompted me to find out what had become of the series since I stopped reading it all those years ago.

A quick look at the edit history confirms that this is probably the work of Wikipedia vandals (a lot of the questionable stuff was added by one guy and the citations are all nonsense), but it did surprise me for a minute. Although part of me wonders if this post-shark-jump series would be any more interesting to read :P

An upcoming release on Steam has me pretty interested. It's a game called AudioSurf, and it was a finalist at this year's Independent Games Festival. The gimmick of the game is that it takes your music (ANY music) and turns it into a puzzle/racing/rhythm game hybrid with multiple game types. It's basically a cross between Rez, Lumines and F-Zero, if that's possible to fathom :P

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk

God Knows by Aya Hirano

One Winged Angel by Nobuo Uematsu/The Black Mages

and just to annoy the crap out of my friends list, here'sNever Gonna Give you up by Rick Astley

It gets released on Steam on Friday for $10, but you can pre-order it before then and get it for $8 along with a copy of the Orange Box soundtrack preloaded into the game for you.

I'm making a note here.

HUGE SUCCESS.

Oh, and here's one for and :

And on a completely random note, I saw all 13 episodes of Minami-ke on Sunday and I loved it. バカ野郎！！！